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   myrmepropagandist (futurebird@sauropods.win)'s status on Friday, 14-Jun-2024 20:54:44 JST myrmepropagandist

   Someone here once told me of how Microsoft had these customers who pay $$$ so a real driving force in the development of Excel are these horrific, unspeakable, monstrosities of spreadsheets critical to the operations of some very serious companies, serious bookkeeping, serious material operations. The elderich horror spreadsheets are decades old, have 100,000s of rows, spaghetti code formulas— Microsoft always checks updates will not harm them. IDK. if it was true: but it *felt* true.

   • 13 barn owls in a trenchcoat repeated this.
   • Embed this notice
     HistoPol (#HP) 🏴 🇺🇸 🏴 (histopol@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 14-Jun-2024 20:55:16 JST HistoPol (#HP) 🏴 🇺🇸 🏴

     in reply to

     @futurebird

     #Excel #Microsoft

     It sounds about right, though IDK about the $$$ part.

     The only "error"/deviation I ever saw, if I remember correctly, was when the formula for counting cells with content started to count "" [nothing/empty] like " " and "0", erroneously as 1.

     Old formulae (usually) continue working. Some time back, I had to verify that the calculations in a spreadsheet from 1995 were still correct. They were (b/c of now posterior human intervention 😉.)
     #VisualBasic,...

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     HistoPol (#HP) 🏴 🇺🇸 🏴 (histopol@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 14-Jun-2024 20:57:08 JST HistoPol (#HP) 🏴 🇺🇸 🏴

     in reply to

     @futurebird

     ...however, often is not fully compatible even with the previous version. (And the number people competent in VB seems to have dropped, too.)

     //

   • Embed this notice
     Eaton (eaton@phire.place)'s status on Friday, 14-Jun-2024 22:29:17 JST Eaton

     in reply to

     • sabik
     • Sean

     @sabik @futurebird @Sean Yeah, I was gonna say, I’m sitting here with a 300k+ row sheet open as we speak

   • Embed this notice
     sabik (sabik@rants.au)'s status on Friday, 14-Jun-2024 22:29:18 JST sabik

     in reply to

     • Sean

     @futurebird @Sean
     1,048,576 rows by 16,384 columns

     https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/excel-specifications-and-limits-1672b34d-7043-467e-8e27-269d656771c3

   • Embed this notice
     myrmepropagandist (futurebird@sauropods.win)'s status on Friday, 14-Jun-2024 22:29:19 JST myrmepropagandist

     in reply to

     • Sean

     @Sean Really? Ok so I must be wrong about the rows! I thought they expanded it for some reason.

   • Embed this notice
     Sean (sean@liberal.city)'s status on Friday, 14-Jun-2024 22:29:21 JST Sean

     in reply to

     @futurebird Excel has a limit of 32k rows, at which point one has to migrate the spreadsheet over to database Access or SQL

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     mhoye (mhoye@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 14-Jun-2024 23:08:05 JST mhoye

     in reply to

     @futurebird Weirdly enough, Excel is probably the best evidence that learning to code really can empower people, entirely on the backs of mostly under-recognized, mostly pink-collar employees getting handed a smalltalk-inspired programming environment largely by accident.

     Excel created a whole secret class of hidden programmers by sneaking a macro language into what used to be a basic calculation-and-display utility, and that whole stack became critical global infrastructure almost immediately.